Mainwaring’s Handel: Its Relation to British Aesthetics

Abstract

Abstract John Mainwaring’s Handel 1 has long been familiar to students of the composer as an early (if not always reliable) biographical source. It is generally accorded a place in music history—or, rather, the history of musical scholarship—as the first biography of a musician. One might expect from a pioneer effort in musical biography little more than the usual collection of anecdotes, authentic and apocryphal, that surround the great artist. Mainwaring has not disappointed in this respect. But his work is far from being a mere biographical memoir, containing, as it does, an extended section of critical Observations on Handel’s compositions.2 These Observations embody a critical point of view that owes its existence to developments in criticism and aesthetic theory, characteristic of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British thought.